Nearly $ 30 billion in storms rocked the United States last year. Thanks to the Data Follow -up of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disasters, we know that disasters become more expensive overall, and we see more crossing the 10 -digit threshold. But the $ 1 billion disaster era is over because the Trump administration announced at the end of last week that it would no longer update the database.
The decision -makers, elected officials and construction, insurance and real estate experts claim that if the elimination of this essential resource feels politically motivated, its economic value has been clear and has often helped cities and businesses to assess risks with reliable data, accessible to the public and impartials.
The NOAA created the database on weather and climatic disasters of a billion dollars in 1980 to follow the storms, floods and other disasters that caused at least as much damage. (The NOAA has not responded to a request to comment on this story.) Although such events are rare, they represent more than 80% of the damages linked to the country’s weather and climatic conditions. During the 45 years that followed its launch, the database has raised 403 admissions, totaling more than 3 billions of dollars in dollars adjusted in terms of inflation.
By scrupulously recording this data, the NOAA could identify trends, including a strong increase in the cost and frequency of disasters from one year to the next and from one decade to the next. Insurance companies, governments of states and premises, researchers and the public used this information to follow climate risks over time, project it into the future and plan accordingly.
A large part of this registers’s outfit occurred at the national centers Centers for Environmental Information, or NCEI. The agency and its climatic data mine are located in Asheville, in North Carolina. The city is only one of the many out of six states that have seen the franc end of Hurricane Helene, the storm of $ 78.7 billion which made the Southeast in September. The west of North Carolina saw one of the highest disaster costs per million residents last year, according to the database calculations.
Local and state authorities collect their own data on disaster costs, but it is often fragmentary. April Pinder, the director of the county of Buncombe, said that the preliminary calculations of the county put Hélène’s losses to something like $ 80 million, the image is not as complete as the most complete information that Noaa provides. “We would all do ours [cost estimates] But the Noaa has this larger image, ”said Pinder.
Local governments are based on consultants and engineers to follow the costs of disasters, but the officials of Asheville told Grist that the resilience measures intended to protect residents against future disasters depended heavily on federal projections. For example, in 2021, the city used the data from the NOAA to plead in favor of the major reconstruction of the dam at the North Fork Reservoir, which provides 70% of the water from Buncombe. This work, completed in 2021, would have prevented the dam from failing during the floods that followed Helene. “The loss of this broader national reference will probably make illustration of the growing scale of disasters and the importance of proactive investments like this,” said Jessica Hughes, a city of communications assistant from Asheville.
This occurs while the region’s assessment of its climate risk undergoes a seismic change. Many people thought they were largely protected from the climate crisis. “After Hurricane Helene, which occurred in an area which had been greeted in the past as a climate refuge in the west of North Carolina, throughout the mountains, we now know that climate paradise do not really exist,” said Carly Fabian, a defender of senior insurance policy at Consumer Rights for non -profit public Citizen.
According to Asheville Realtor Hadley Cropp, people do in -depth research before deciding where to move. Helene questioned the idea of a “climate refuge”, leading house buyers to start asking new questions and looking for detailed climatic data before deciding if and where to buy. “Helene has moved the landscape a little,” said CROPP. “The floodplates have been extended and redesigned, and therefore people before Hélène have never really asked questions about this kind of thing unless it is specifically in an obvious flood plain.”
Although insurance companies are counting on several data sets to fix the prices, the NOAA information was largely reliable, said Jason Tyson, spokesperson for the North Carolina Insurance Department. “Because it comes from the government, it is not embarrassed by the rival databases which could have a kind of agenda,” he said. The industry is largely understood as recognizing climate change in an apolitically – because it costs them a lot of money, they simply have to understand it, predicting the future risk in order to better protect themselves against losses.
The database has not meticulously detailed how climate change feeds larger and hotter forest fires, the intensification of hurricanes and exacerbating floods. It provided the economic quantification of what the cost of a given disaster and the way in which these costs increased: in the 1980s, the United States experienced just over three billion dollars in disasters per year. This statement has skyrocketed at 23 per year between 2020 and 2024. “It is certainly not a plot of disasters to climate change over time,” said Daniel Swain, air conditioning at the University of California in Los Angeles. “It is a conspiracy to increase disaster losses for various reasons understand Climate change, but that is certainly not limited to it, and maybe not even the main engine in many cases. »»
Yes, without a doubt, climate change has made disasters more expensive for victims, government and insurers. But at the same time, more people have settled where hurricanes draw land along the Gulf coast, and in the interfaces of wild-urban lands where housing in developments in wooded areas. This puts more and more structures like damage. The United States has also enriched itself, which means that larger houses filled with more things.
However, the researchers used the database to help them understand how disasters of a billion dollars are becoming more and more common and what role climate change must play in worsening hurricanes, heat waves and floods. “It is surprisingly difficult to obtain reliable and reliable high quality estimates of economic damage associated with health events and effects associated with events,” said Kristina Dahl, vice-president of Central Climate Science, a non-profit research and communication organization. “It is therefore a real loss with the ability to start using this database to try to analyze the economic damage associated with climate change.”
The NOAA was only well placed to maintain such a database, because some of the information ingested came from insurance companies. “They do not necessarily want to disclose this to their competitors, but they were ready to disclose it to this non -partisan scientific agency,” said Swain. “And therefore Noaa was able to obtain information to access this database to which it is not clear that anyone can have access to.” It is therefore unlikely that anyone in the private sector is able to create a comparable data set. “It is the dismay and even the alarm of many people, for example, in the insurance sector,” said Swain, “which would be the most suitable industry to potentially develop an alternative.”
The loss of the database will have training effects, added Swain, as there is a very long list of entities that use this information to determine where to rebuild after a disaster, where to take up cultures and where to ensure: federal agencies, local governments, construction industry, real estate industry, agricultural interests and insurers. “Really,” said Swain, “who doesn’t Need this information in a certain form starts to perhaps become an easier question to answer. »»
With or without the database, the disasters of a billion dollars will continue to occur, and almost certainly with more frequency when the planet warms up. “It is not because we stop reporting this information that disasters stop and the damage ends,” said Dahl. “It really leaves us more in the dark as a nation.”
